Voices At Sunset
by skysedge
Summary: "I'm always the one that's late." Post-series/not-quite-AU.


**A/N – _To fully understand this, you will need to have read right to the end of volume 8. Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, albeit abstract ones. You have been warned! This was written so that I could play with ideas. I'd explain them, and the setting, but that ruins the fun. It's all in the story. Drop a review if you enjoy/don't enjoy/just want to say hi. Thanks for clicking!_**

* * *

A sunset.

The doctor's silvery hair was a liquid rainbow beneath the dancing lights of the basement bar. He sat in a corner, staring at his hands and uncomfortable in ill-fitting casual clothes. The music was loud, the air was hot and the dancing bodies on the floor beyond a defensive line of tables were disgusting. For this man, most people were. Those of his own age were doubly so.

Nearing his thirtieth year, this doctor had never danced with a woman in a club. He had never gone for a drink with friends and had never been drunk enough to laugh and sing as if he didn't have a care in the world. If asked he would have said that this was because he was a professional. A leading London psychologist, in fact, at the very forefront of his field in research. He was a therapist, a scientist, and a man with an easy smile in front of his patients.

In front of his patients, he was a compassionate, quiet and amiable young man. A little old-fashioned in his methods of speech and a little too fond of privacy but not difficult to like. Sitting in the corner, he thought that he was alone. His smile was missing. His long hair was loose and fell around his face in gentle waves, hiding his features from general view. In the darkness there, his pale eyes were narrowed with anxiety. They always were, when hidden from view. He sat perfectly still, a marble statue from an ancient world in a modern setting, out of place and almost unnoticed by the populace. The table in front of him was empty. Buying a drink seemed pointless, to this man. He was not interested in keeping up appearances, not on that night.

He was waiting for someone who had already arrived. Someone was watching and smiling a cruel smile that they could not be bothered to hide.

In this man's hand was a glass of beer. His last, he had decided. After tonight, there would be nothing. He had lost all attachment to the world years before. This meeting, and what he intended to say, made up the whole of his reason for living. The doctor did not know this. _Some psychologist you are, _the man thought but knew it wasn't fair. They were different when they were together. He had felt it from the start.

He approached the table by weaving through the seething mass of sweat-soaked youthful bodies. The music pounded and throbbed through his skull and he laughed at the sensation, at feeling so alive when he no longer wanted to. Hopeless. He was hopeless. He had _always _been hopeless. But not for much longer.

"I'm late."

The doctor raised his eyes as the voice reached him. The corner was the quietest place in the bar, just as he had been told. By leaning forwards he could hear almost perfectly.

"Cassian. You're late."

"I know."

A long silence passed between the two men, one standing and one sitting, an empty table in between. Looking down, it seemed to Cassian as if the wooden surface was swimming with words and images they didn't need to say.

"I'm always the one that's late."

The doctor was given no chance to reply as Cassian moved to sit beside him, long legs bent awkwardly under the table. He was dressed as always, clothes far more suitable to the atmosphere than the doctor's. Worn jeans looked black in the dark between the bands of coloured light. Fingerless gloves came to rest calmly on the table. He met the doctor's confused gaze with a dark scowl.

"Do you know why I asked you to meet me here?"

"I assumed...for therapy," the doctor said quietly. "Help that...you couldn't get at the clinic. Why else would you-"

"Do you know why you agreed?"

A moment of silence, a frown, and then a faint echo of his usual plastic smile. "I'm your doctor. I'm here to help you."

"No, you're not. Do you know why I'm here?"

More silence this time. Cassian dared him to mention therapy with his eyes alone. The doctor abstained and shook his head, meeker now than Cassian had ever seen him. Out of his comfort zone, stripped of his protective professional gear and treated as an equal. It was freeing, talking like this. He felt more alive from this than the music could ever have managed.

"I'm here because I want to hurt you, Dr Disraeli," he said calmly, expression unchanging. "I want to make you suffer. I want to make you cry. You hurt me, before. A long time ago. You don't remember, do you? But you will. By tomorrow, you will."

-x-

Cassian was a troubled man.

He had always been a troubled man. A chemical imbalance, some had said. Something wired wrong in his brain. Some defect. Something from birth that could never be altered. He found it almost funny, how hopeless everything was. If he had been born with a physical defect, surely surgery or something else would have fixed him. As it was he had neither the motive nor the motivation to try and change.

Depression. Anger management problems. Schizophrenia. Dis-associative Identity Disorder. No one had been able to decide.

Sometimes he would weep for days on end, lamenting old wounds and old heartbreak that he could not remember. Other days he would find himself playing with knives, driving them into his living room walls and feeling frustrated when he couldn't hit whatever he was aiming at. He'd never learned to throw knives but his failure to do so well sickened him to the stage of vomiting. And then there were the shakes, the sleepless nights, the apathy. He felt too large during those times and would curl in on himself as if trying to revert to childhood. This wasn't true, however. Childhood had been no better.

The nights where he managed sleep were always the worst. When he slept, there would be dreams. He saw things, heard things, felt things and nothing related to himself. Often he dreamed of knives. Sometimes he dreamed of watching autopsies or surgery. Regularly he would see a small old man, a younger man with willowy hair. Almost every night there was a man in glasses with a cruel smile. Upon waking, he would imagine taking a dream-knife and plunging it through the man's dream-heart. He knew this wasn't healthy. That didn't stop it feeling good.

The worst of it came in the form of voices. Voices when he was waking, murmuring in his ear. The words _use it wisely _visited most often, followed by a name he did not know. They sickened him, the smug words and the name, and they filled him with boiling, seething rage that he was unable to control. Several times he had lashed out, driven his fist into a wall until it bled and hissed between clenched teeth.

"That's not my name. _Why _is it not my name? Why not _me?_"

Life had been difficult. Predictably difficult, under those circumstances. He had never thought much of it and had done his best to get by. Nothing spectacular, in his eyes, and nothing any more seedy than anyone else in his position. He made enemies mostly. It was impossible to keep friends. By the age of thirty, he was ready to give up. Not just ready but prepared; pills, a bath, a razor. Everything was sorted. He would fall asleep and maybe the dreams would swallow him whole and maybe there would be nothing at all but either way was fine, either way was _perfect _because then he could leave this unfair world behind and find who he truly was.

It took the blood spiraling into the water from the first gash in his write to show him the way. He had watched the blood through a medicated haze, the way it twisted and turned, and within the blood there had been little people. He saw himself, only younger, armed with throwing knives and clad in black. He saw himself die with a sword wound in his back. He saw himself reborn, a new face but he knew it was him. He saw himself burying a body. No clear faces but his own and no colour, just blood and water and pain.

"I said I would save you," he had shouted, sinking further into the water. "Who are you? Who am I? Why do I need to save someone I've never met when I just...want..."

He had lost consciousness. And an angel had saved him.

-x-

Watching Cassian in the bar, the doctor had come to realise that his training had not prepared him for this. The anger seemed to seep from Cassian's very skin, coils of cold rage carrying on the blue lights across the space between them. He had never seen this in the clinic. He had seen the sadness, the confusion, had met the multiple people that seemed to speak through Cassian's lips.

He had not expected anger. Cassian had been gentle towards him, always, even when fighting against others. The doctor did not scare easily; he had seen enough anger to render him neutral in the face of most emotions. But Cassian's anger frightened him. It glittered deep in his dark eyes and promised a threat just for him.

"You want to hurt me?" he repeated slowly. "Why?"

"I just told you," Cassian snapped. "And don't use that voice with me. We're not in the clinic. I'm not your patient."

The doctor looked around. Their current surroundings couldn't not be further from the fabricated calm of the clinic. He felt naked here. In contrast, Cassian seemed to wear the darkness and the noise like a second skin.

"You are my patient no matter where we are." His voice was calmer now, almost as collected as it should have been.

"Then I quit." The answer was swift and impossible to negotiate. "I want to talk to you, not the guy in the office. Which is really nice, by the way. Seems like you're always born better off than me."

The doctor blinked long-lashed eyes in Cassian's direction, forgetting to direct his hair into hiding a truly shocked expression. _Always? _It sounded ludicrous,even for a man who listened to the delusions of the insane every day. Ludicrous but fitting. Cassian said it so easily that it sunk easily into his brain. He agreed, inwardly. Outwardly, he frowned.

"What do you-"

"_Just listen. _I told you about the voices. Do you remember the one that you called the priest?"

He did. Cassian had often repeated phrases he had heard as if they had been spoken by someone else. There was a cruel man, he said, a cruel man that shared his face. This man often spoke of torture, or of the waste of humanity that was the lower class. Not an unusual insecurity in someone so poor but a little too out-dated for Cassian's usual logical thoughts. Cassian had said that he had seen robes, circles, altars. The name had made sense to them both.

"You told me it was a priest so I-"

"I know. Listen. Do you remember?"

Cassian was speaking quickly, holding nothing back. The doctor wondered if they were on a time limit. In their appointments, they had a strict timetable. He had thought it would be freer out here. The outside world was not something he was understanding at all. Cassian seemed to know everything. There was considerable age gap between them but that didn't seem to be the issue. It was more intrinsic than that. Abandoning the last of his usual control, he slumped in his seat and leant heavily on the table, hands linking nervously together. His smile was nowhere in sight.

"Yes. What has he been telling you about me?"

No. That was not the question he had meant to ask. The priest had never mentioned him. Nor had any of Cassian's voices. Numerous people remained namelessbut none of them were _him. _Cassian would have told him. He had said no such thing. And he certainly hadn't styled the priest as a gossip, a lover of rumours. The impression must have gathered in the doctor's mind of it's own accord. The delusions were not meant to become his own. He shuddered and rephrased the question.

"What have you heard?"

"I overheard him talking to you."

Again, the doctor was at a loss. If only he had his notes, his books... But Cassian didn't want that. He wanted the man behind the title, the human inside the science. As a doctor, he suspected Cassian had suffered a true breakdown. As a man, he felt a sudden tightness in his chest, a lurching as if he was falling, a constriction in his throat. Perhaps it was because he had become important enough for Cassian to think about him. The doctor did not care for people, had never thought it possible. Cassian, as always, was different. It was infuriating being unable to understand but as exhilarating as a new sunrise.

The frown was impossible to hold onto as Cassian continued.

"I don't even know your first name but I know that you had problems at home. You've always had problems at home. Your...father." He paused, frowning, and shook his head. "It was your father. It might be different this time. But your home is not happy at all. You have scars, somewhere, inflicted by someone else."

"How do you..."

"I also know that you love animals. You always have. You should be keeping birds. Doves. Maybe pigeons, now, but birds either way. You love them. They're innocent, not like your patients. You secretly like hearing us suffer. It makes you feel better about your own life. Right?"

The doctor was speechless. He repeated Cassian's words in the privacy of his own head, jaw falling slack and eyes wide in uncharacteristic loss for logic. He had never known his father but had grown up with an uncle who beat him almost daily. His mother had vanished when he was young, along with his sisters. He always made sure to wear long sleeves to hide the scars his uncle had left him, most of them belt marks on his back. He had done so well in life that he had felt it was safe to forget that.

And pigeons. He kept pigeons on the roof of his apartment complex. The only peace he really knew was coming home and sitting with them, feeding them from his hands. He liked their simplicity. From the rooftop, surrounded by birds and potted plants, he would dream of forests and freedom. Idle dreams, really. Not dreams that anyone should know.

The worst part was also true. Sometimes, he would go home and laugh about the stories he had heard. What did some of his patients know of suffering? A man had lost his wife? At least he had known love. A child had lost their parents? At least they had happy memories, trust funds, heirlooms. People were so pathetic they sickened him. It was why he studied them. There was nothing like condensing someone's miseries into a small file to make himself feel superior. It was his best kept secret, the smile behind the one he presented.

Every life was a joke. Or it had been.

"But...not...yours..."

His voice was almost silent, easily missed amidst the music. While he had been thinking, working through his shock, Cassian had edged closer. The man's hands shook violently against the table, knuckles rapping unintentionally against the wood. The doctor realised he didn't need to explain anything. Nor did he want to. And he couldn't lie and deny the truth either.

Cassian's eyes were joyful. They seemed to shine, full of vitality and confidence that they had always lacked before. _A breakdown, _the doctor thought again. _He believes all the delusions and I am not helping. _That was logical. But it didn't feel true. And the happiness he could see there, the self-awareness that Cassian had always lacked, was unrivaled in beauty.

He had said something that he had been meaning to say for a long time. Why did it feel that way?

"What do you know about me?" Cassian asked gently, voice composed despite the trembling in his limbs.

"What you've told me."

"Not what I've told you. What do you _know?_"

It was unavoidable. It was as if something had finally fallen into place in his mind. All those daydreams after work, all the cruel and sad thoughts, all the silent longing he had avoided giving a name to. He remembered the way his heart had stopped beating when he first saw Cassian in person. A shock. Everything had been a shock. But the shock was from familiarity, not from the unknown. He had spoken a lot to the doves that night, using words that he had never used before.

"That...you're different. Everything is different, when it's you."

This seemed close enough. The joy was still burning fiercely in Cassian's eyes. _Hello, _he found himself thinking._ I've always been the slowest one to react. _

"We...we've known each other a long time," he hazarded. "Haven't we?"

Around them, the music danced with the lights. Electricity flowed through the wires of the building like blood through a body and into the greedy dancers, in through the air and the drinks and the touches of skin to skin. He felt sickened by it all. Things should never be that way. Things were more complex, more beautiful than a rave or a buzz or a night spent in a stranger's bed. Had these people never felt that? Was it not normal to look at a sunrise and feel connected to the unending cycle of birth and death and rebirth?

"Do you hear voices too?"

Cassian's voice was quiet, almost pleading. The doctor wished he could agree.

"Only my own," he answered.

-x-

He had heard the shouting through the wall.

It was a routine visit, a checkup on a recovering patient who had taken to living in a cheap block of flats with more than enough cats. The doctor had carefully not touched the furniture but a few questions made it clear that the delusions he so loved hearing about had passed. He had been making ready to leave when the shouting drifted through the wall.

_Who are you?_

In that instant, he had recognised the voice. It didn't matter that he couldn't remember how or where or what the person looked like. He recognised a voice calling out in despair, calling out for _him _and he had needed to answer.

Breaking down the door was easier than he had expected. He'd learnt watching his uncle. He had rushed through the flat to find a man lying fully clothed in a bath, bleeding and sinking below the water.

For a moment he had been unable to move. It had been a physical, real pain in his heart. Someone was dying. Someone that he didn't want to die.

From there it had been simpler than he could have predicted. An ambulance, an assessment and an immediate referral. Cassian had been wary at first, or so the doctor had thought. Slowly an element of trust had been built and the doctor found his newest patient fascinating.

Voices from people he did not know. Memories that did not belong to him. Bouts of grief that had no cause. Moments of anger with no origin. He had suspected repressed memories but nothing had been able to bring them to the surface. Lost in the challenge of finding an answer, he had almost forgotten about the strange initial feelings.

It had been easy to ignore them after a few months had passed. There had been stranger emotions that needed dealing with. He had found himself worrying when Cassian left the clinic, actually caring whether he was happy or not. He liked the way Cassian would smile in his good moments, the casual positivity he tried to inject even in his situation. _The weather's bad but it's nice and warm in here. I'm completely broke but it's fine, I have tins of beans and stuff. We're both really tired, maybe we should nap. No? Sorry, just a joke, no need to look so confused._

His smiles had been easy to remember.

And then the dreams had begun. In the dreams he only ever heard or saw himself. He had a labcoat, a strange cluttered office that still felt like the clinic. He heard himself give orders and then silently reprimand himself. He heard pain in his own voice, desperation, calm admittance of insanity that seemed all too easy to understand.

After the dreams, he had begun hearing his own voice whispering thoughts to him during his time on the roof with the pigeons. One phrase in particular. _You're the one who saved me. _Over and over and over again. _You're the one who saved me._

But he had never been saved and he never expected to be. It had been mystifying.

Perhaps in an attempt to stop this cycle, he had begun letting scenarios play out naturally in his head. He had wondered about Cassian, his past, his life. He had imagined neglectful parents, an illicit affair with a cruel woman, a violent encounter. He saw the streets of London, both filled with cars and horses, sunglasses and top hats. It had been almost charming, nostalgic, as if he was remembering a story from childhood. He felt as if he knew his patient far more intimately than he did. It had been another secret to keep.

And then he had received the invitation in the form of a letter. A basement. A bar. A conversation. It had made no sense and he had agreed knowing that.

It had felt inevitable. Falling. The feeling in his chest when he looked at Cassian was definitely one of falling. He had never been able to tell whether he was falling backwards or forwards, or how many times he had fallen before.

-x-

"I know about the woman," he said after a long pause. "There was a woman who used you. And I know that your parents left you. But I don't know why. Who...who are you?"

"Just me. I'm just...me. And you're just you. We've always been that way. You don't have to remember. Just feel it"

Cassian watched as the doctor closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. He was starting to understand, it seemed. It had taken Cassian a while himself so he could not judge or mock. Maybe it was easier if you were insane. Not that it had helped the doctor, before. The joy drained from his countenance in an instant.

_Right. That's why I'm here. I need to do it right._

"You did something terrible," he said, reaching out and grabbing the doctor's wrist. "You can't remember. That's fine. But you need to know. You see, I have dreams I didn't tell you about. I bury you in those dreams. I bury you and the headstone is blank, carved with animals, in the middle of a meadow. I bury you and then I wander back to the city and...everything goes dark. I can't remember how or where but I die. Always. I always die alone."

"I'm sorry."

The apology went unheeded as Cassian continued, voice growing in volume.

"I get so _angry _when I look at weren't there to see me suffer. I had no one. And this time I've never had anyone. Not a single person. That's your fault. So when I see you, I want to...I want to kill you. Sometimes. But it's not just that. I want to..."

The kiss came out of nowhere. There was a hand in the doctor's hair and he was pulled forward to meet gentle lips that had been speaking rough words. He felt tears against his face and his breath burned in his throat. There was pain in the kiss. Pain and bitterness and anguish. But there were tender things to feel too, things beyond words. Forgiveness, maybe. Devotion. Perhaps even love. The doctor was unable to breath as they broke apart, any words they had been thinking rendered useless.

"Ask me for help," Cassian gasped, eyes pleading. "Beg me to stay with you. I understand everything, do you see? If you want to understand, you'll beg."

"Please help me."

He hadn't meant to speak but the words were in the air before he could dream of reeling them in. The wetness on his cheeks were his own. He failed to flinch as Cassian wiped them away with a rough thumb.

"I've always dealt with everything alone. Even this...even knowing you. So help me. Tell me who we are, please. I...i beg of you. Tell me what I can do to...fix...whatever it is that I broke. Please."

The reply was as swift and a cold as a winter river.

"I can't."

"But...you asked..."

_I want to hurt you. _Pain blossomed as if he had been pierced with a sharp blade.

"It's not fair, Cassian continued. "Not yet. Do you understand? I need to make it fair. I didn't save you last time. I'm not going to save you this time, either. And you're not going to save me. If you do, it'll never end."

It made sense. Somewhere in the doctor's deepest heart he understood. He could see something in his mind's eye, feel rough hands holding him and a sharp blade against his throat, words he had meant to say.

"I don't know what's going to happen to you after tomorrow but it's going to hurt. It needs to hurt."

Cassian was speaking calmly again, as if he had rehearsed a speech. The doctor felt fresh tears on his cheeks and was pulled close. Cassian's voice rumbled in his chest as he continued.

"It's okay," he said soothingly. "It's going to be okay. I worked it out. When we meet again...and we _will _meet again, even though we may not realise it...when we meet again everything is going to be okay. We'll be even."

He pulled away, held the doctor at arm's length and fixed him with an utterly sane stare. The doctor shook his head, not understanding, not wanting to understand.

"Matched in sin, in suffering, in selflessness...we will have both failed once," Cassian explained. "So when we meet again, I will save you. And you will save me, merely by being. It'll be over. We'll be...whatever we want to be. For the first time."

In Cassian's eyes, the doctor could see an eternity of suffering. The sun rose and set, rose and set, bled all over the landscape again and again, burned the two of them to ashes. Sometimes they met under the cruel cycle. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they killed one another. Sometimes they died together. And the last time, a time of a tall building and long corridors, cards and robes and scalpels, arcane names and elaborate furniture...the last time, he had been unfair. Caught up in their current world he had lost the thread that connected him to all those sunsets.

Cassian's tears had been hot on his dying cheek.

He fell against the other man, short of breath and trembling with mental anguish. Too much. Too quickly.

"Forgive me, doctor," Cassian whispered. "I need to destroy you first. I'll see you again. A hundred years. Wait for me. When we meet again, we meet as equals."

He slipped away through the chaos of modern culture as the doctor sank into his seat and across the table, wracked with he sobbing of a thousand lives. Cassian went home to the bath, the pills, the razor. The next day, he was gone. And for the doctor, there was darkness.

-x-

The sun set.

-x-

A train station. Kings Cross, London, vaulted glass ceiling, a remnant of a bygone age.

Beneath the roof, two men. A glance. A breath.

"I'm late."

"You're late."

"I know."

And a sunrise.


End file.
